A knife was gouging into Riina’s right hand. It slipped into her flesh and sank deep, sending pain up her arm that then radiated across her body. Every muscle in her body clenched at once, and she tried to scream.

  Nothing came out. She felt panic welling in her throat and desperately tried to wake up, to see who was doing this to her, to make it end. But there was no way she could wake up. Just as she reached the surface of the ocean of pain she was drowning in, she found that it had frozen over. She smashed her fists into the ice over and over, but it did nothing. Her struggling became weaker and weaker until she finally closed her eyes and sank to the bottom.

  Riina awoke, drowning in sweat. She threw off the covers of her bed, desperate for cool air.

  … I’m back in my own room.

  Her memory was foggy. Recollecting anything that had happened recently felt like wading through a swamp. But she was certain she had been on a rooftop with that mysterious girl. Riina glanced at her phone, and saw that it was 10pm on the 12th of October. Over 24 hours had passed since she met Exon, and yet she had no knowledge of anything that had happened between then and now.

  Riina absentmindedly walked into the bathroom, and was almost about to dismiss everything that had happened until she saw her reflection in the mirror. On the back of her right hand, there was a red line. It shone with an unnatural light and illuminated her surroundings. It was oriented such that she could read it if she held her arm up as if she was checking the time on a wristwatch, and as Riina did so she realised that it wasn’t just a line. There were two extra strokes that turned into the number 1.

  One… what?

  Her sleep-addled mind couldn’t make sense of it. Frustrated, she headed down to the kitchen to talk to her mother, whom she hoped would still be awake. She found her leaning on the dining table, attended by five crumpled cans of beer (two on their sides) and one intact can clasped in her hand. Her mother’s phone laid face-up, the screen displaying some inane mobile puzzle game.

  “Oh! Hey, sweetie. Have a nice nap?~”

  As Shiiko Ivyn slurred her words, her daughter narrowed her eyes.

  “Mom, you’re drunk again? Isn’t that the 15th day in a row?”

  “Huh? It’s a Saturday, so it doesn’t matter…”

  “… That doesn’t make sense as an answer… okay, whatever. Mom, can you see this number 1 on my hand?”

  Shiiko raised her head at her daughter’s question and squinted her eyes at Riina’s outstretched hand, trying to focus on it. Riina gulped, suddenly anxious about what the answer to her inquiry would be.

  “…Nnnope. Nothing there, angel. Are you sure you’re not drunk? Fwahaha!!”

  Riina clicked her tongue at her mother’s foolish antics, before thanking her and heading back upstairs. Her mind raced, erasing all the exhaustion that had previously clouded her thoughts. Was everything that happened yesterday real? Was this what Exon had meant with her ominous final words?

  Riina’s eyes widened. That girl… with all her superhuman traits she had warned Riina about, it was easy to believe that placing some kind of magic sigil on her hand was within Exon’s skillset.

  “If that’s true… she could’ve at least told me what the sigil means. One what… one what…” Riina muttered to herself, now mildly irritated by Exon’s cryptic words. If only the girl had stuck around after seemingly knocking Riina out and dragging her back to her house, she could have asked about it. With that option out of the window, Riina booted up a search engine on her PC and searched…

  “Umm… ‘glowing number on hand’…?”

  Predictably, the results were full of conspiracy theory sites and forums talking about how the biblical end of the world was approaching. Just as Riina was about to give up, thinking that trying to use the internet for such a thing had obviously been a stupid idea, one link caught her attention.

  Akuma no Shirushi. ‘Devil Brand’. The site had an intentionally retro aesthetic, calling back to when the internet was first used as a gathering space for people to discuss their interests. It seemed to be an online forum, but Riina was more interested in the welcome page. It read:

  “If you have found this site, rejoice. You have been chosen as one of the inheritors of the new world. But only if you are willing to fight for it.”

  This reads like more of the same conspiracy theory bullshit.

  But even so, Riina kept reading.

  “The number on your dominant hand is your Quota. To survive and inherit the new world, you must kill this many people. If you do not, when the War comes to an end, your life will be forfeit.”

  A deep chill ran through Riina’s body. This was real. It wasn’t a conspiracy theory or a hoax. There were dozens of pictures on the site of people’s hands with numbers just like hers. Riina glanced down at her hand. One person. If she wanted to survive, she had to kill one person.

  “Your Quota is the price you pay for the miraculous gift you have attained. The Devil Brand. If you succeed in the War, you will retain this ability for the rest of your life. But to find it, there is only one way. You must push your body to its limit. Perseverance is the paramount virtue you must create in order to survive. To you, Devil Brand Wielder, we have but one last message: good luck.”

  Riina hugged herself to stop the trembling that had filled her body as she read. She swallowed down the burning, rising bile of her terror. As minutes, hours passed, she convinced herself she had stopped shaking. But she never stopped hugging herself, and she did not sleep.

  By the next morning, Riina had created some kind of weak, flickering spark of determination within herself. She was going to try and find Exon and do what she had intended to do from the start. Help her. Whatever power she now possessed, she intended to use it for that purpose.

  After refreshing herself with a shower, Riina looked over her figure, frowning slightly. Her black hair was messy and overgrown, her bangs slipping over her eyes, and contrasted harshly with the pale skin of a recluse. Furthermore, she bore the trademark signs of a sedentary lifestyle - too much stomach fat, arms and legs with no definition. She sighed deeply as she realised that she couldn’t begin to think of becoming Exon’s shield if she couldn’t even get serious about exercising. Riina threw on a faded graphic T-shirt displaying characters from an obscure anime OVA and some cargo pants. If she was going to find Exon, that would almost certainly mean trekking all over the City, and she wasn’t about to do that without appropriate footwear. She put on worn combat boots and stepped out of the front door.

  The City was huge. At this point, it dwarfed its predecessor tenfold, and new developments were cropping up all the time. In its current state, it was composed of fifty distinct Wards, many of which overlapped in terms of the type of building and industry that could be found there. For example, the Central Business District sprawled over a dozen of the Wards by itself and threatened to assimilate more with each new project. Riina’s first idea to narrow down the search was to return to the area where she had originally seen Exon for the first time.

  Riina entered the Ward 23 Central Station, passing by the homeless who populated the station square. The disparity of wealth in the City had only ever grown in her nearly two decades of life, and the police constantly patrolled and made rough sleepers move on, so it was increasingly common to see new faces replace the old every few days. She boarded the monorail to Ward 8, settling in for a twenty minute journey with electronic music playing in her earbuds. As her eyes wandered, they met the stare of another person. He wore black gloves, boots and a long trench coat that concealed most of his face, but Riina could see that he had dark skin and bleached blonde hair styled into a pompadour. Bothered by being watched, she shifted uncomfortably, cleared her throat, and looked away. A few stations later, by the time she looked back, he was long gone.

  When Riina had started her search it was about 9am, and the Sun had been steadily rising. Now it was directly overhead, and she had made no progress at all. Weary from her all-nighter and having skipped breakfast, Riina had decided to stop for lunch. She sat in a quaint cafe in the trendy area of New Orion Street, absentmindedly eating a sandwich while wondering what to do next. As she looked out of the window, watching people walk past on the street, time seemed to slow down. On the roof of a building across the road, there she was. A flash of black, streaking through the air. The cloak that was too big for her. There, dashing from rooftop to rooftop, vaulting over the gaps between buildings, was Exon.

  Riina stood bolt upright in shock, her heart suddenly pounding. She almost tripped over the doorframe as she flew out of the cafe, desperate to keep Exon in her sights. She ran faster than she ever had before, until her leg muscles were burning up, screaming for rest, and then pushed even harder. When she could finally go no further and slumped against the wall of an alleyway, sinking to the ground as the pain chastised her for straining herself so much, there was no sign of Exon.

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  I never had a chance of catching up to her.

  “Agh, shit!!!” Riina slammed her fist into the wall behind her, frustrated at being reminded of her inadequacy once more. She couldn’t get through to Exon, so the other girl had knocked her out and then taken Riina all the way back to her house by herself. She couldn’t find Exon, and then even when given a miraculous opportunity to find her again, even when that needle emerged from the haystack and presented itself to her, she hadn’t been able to take hold of it.

  Riina felt tears welling up in her eyes and blinked them away.

  Stupid. Crying like a child. Aren’t you an adult? Act like it!

  She couldn’t stop the hot tears dripping down her cheeks. It was all she could do to cover her mouth and stifle a sob that would’ve embarrassed her even more if it had been allowed out.

  The light from the road beside her shifted and a shadow fell upon Riina. She looked up to see what it was, worried that someone had seen her crying and was coming over to ask what was wrong, and saw him.

  The man from the monorail carriage. His trench coat was open now, revealing a white T-shirt with the logo of a band Riina had vaguely heard of printed on it. But more importantly, the glove on his right hand was gone, and Riina gasped when she realised it bore a glowing, red “3”.

  “Aw, hey, don’t cry. I can’t exactly feel good about this if you’re that upset.”

  The man’s words didn’t make any sense to Riina, but she leapt to her feet and backed away, suddenly detecting a malevolent aura from the stranger.

  “… I’m guessing you’re new. Normal people can’t see the Quota, but any other Branded can. You’ve been walking around all day with a target painted on yourself.”

  Riina was lost for words, and now frozen in place. All she could think about was how stupid she must be, that she hadn’t even thought to cover up the thing that identified her as a part of whatever this was. Bemused at the lack of any kind of response, the man continued.

  “Look, I’m sorry, but jobs are jobs. If I kill you, I get paid, and I’m one step closer to meeting my Quota. I’ll make it quick and painless, so please don’t struggle.”

  Then, raising that right hand that bore the Devil Brand, he shouted.

  “… Point Liner!”

  And it appeared. A coiled strip of fabric, twisting around the man’s body, ending in an arrowhead, the kind you’d expect to see on a road sign. The man had no more words to say, and yet it moved. In one instant, it was stationary, and in the very next instant it was flying towards Riina at a speed she couldn’t possibly react to.

  It smashed into the wall to her left, blowing a hole in the brickwork where she had been cowering milliseconds before. Somehow, she had flinched just enough for it to miss. The assailant tutted and the arrow, as if in response, pulled back and coiled around him once more.

  It fired out again, and Riina did the only thing she could: she ran. It bulldozed the concrete at her feet, chunks of pavement flying up from the impact, and she was somehow, somehow just able to avoid it. Again and again it struck, and Riina’s luck began to run out. It grazed her thigh, and then drew a line of blood on her arm, and then pierced her ankle. She yelped and wrenched herself free, stumbling forward, no longer thinking, operating on pure instinct. Behind her, the man’s expression hardened.

  “Doesn’t she realise she’s running towards a dead end? … Fuck. I said I’d make it painless, didn’t I? Yet here I am, dragging it out because my heart’s not in it. Okay, time to end it.”

  As he watched, Point Liner rushed forward, aiming at the girl’s back. As she ran, she heard it whistling through the air behind her.

  And then she stopped, because there was a huge amount of pain in her chest, and she looked down. Protruding from the front of her torso was the arrowhead, dripping with her blood. It seemed to have pierced through the left side of her chest, so the sputtering, weak heartbeat she could feel was probably because her heart had been sliced in two. The arrowhead retracted, bringing a wave of fresh agony rolling over Riina’s body. But then it started to go away, because everything was going away. She couldn’t feel her hands and feet anymore, and then it was her arms and legs, and she collapsed. So all the blood pouring out of her chest was now accumulating in a puddle on the ground.

  Hey, was all of that really inside of me? That’s too much blood… Way too much…

  That was her last thought before she closed her eyes and went to sleep.

  And then, she woke up.

  “What a weird dream…” Riina murmured, wondering why she was lying on the ground. She looked down at her reflection in the pool of blood she was lying in. The same blood stained her T-shirt. She looked like someone had spilled red wine on her. Thinking that, she chuckled, and slowly got to her feet. After brushing the dirt off her clothes, she turned and came face to face with that man.

  “Huh…? That was real?!”

  Riina’s jaw dropped as things clicked into place within her brain. Everything that had just happened really did happen. She really did die. And yet, she was unharmed. The only logical conclusion was this:

  “My Devil Brand.” Riina grinned, smiling at the incredulous face of the foe who had cut her down only moments before. His face changed from shock to anger, and then finally settled on a small smile.

  “Heh. Guess I’ll have to say it was a failure. You can’t kill what can’t die. Then, see you around.”

  With a line that was surely intended to sound cool, the flustered man launched himself upwards with his ability, flying over the roof of the adjacent building, and disappeared.

  Riina travelled home in a daze. She had bought some gloves to cover her Quota, and kept pulling on the hem of the gloves to reassure herself they were still there and she hadn’t exposed herself as a target again. The monorail journey and the walk home from the station blended into a dull, grey mixture that slipped through her mind, and before she knew it, Riina was standing in front of the door to her house.

  Stepping inside, she slipped off her boots and went straight up to her room, going past the mannequin of a brown-haired girl in a black bodysuit and flopping onto the bed without changing her clothes. It was only late afternoon, but Riina was so tired she felt like she could sleep for a week. She turned over and laid on her back, staring up at the ceiling. Her mind was still swirling with the events of today. Although she now possessed the miraculous power of regeneration, the pain had been real. She had felt the excruciating agony of her heart being destroyed, and it terrified her.

  Suddenly, a shape blotted out the warm light of the afternoon Sun. Riina jumped and scrambled away, retreating to the corner of her bed that was up against the wall.

  “Um… sorry. I didn’t mean to scare you. I thought you knew I was in here.”

  Riina smacked her forehead in annoyance.

  “It’s been a long day. Uh… what are you doing here, anyway?”

  Exon shuffled her feet and spoke sheepishly.

  “I think I owe you an explanation. And an apology. I… your hand. I did that to you.”

  She bit her lip and looked down.

  “You must hate me.”

  “No. Of course I don’t hate you. Actually… I’m happy.”

  Riina reached out and gently touched Exon’s hand, held to her chest, which had begun to tremble.

  “Happy…? How can you say that?! I’ve given you a death sentence!!”

  “Because now I can protect you.”

  Exon couldn’t say anything. She just stood still as tears gently rolled down her face and fell to the floor.

  “If you didn’t want my help, if you didn’t need someone to save you, you wouldn’t have given me this power. All I’m doing is filling those shoes and rising to the occasion.”

  Exon sat down on the bed, a few hands’ distance from Riina. She looked so fragile that Riina wanted to hold her tight forever. But she didn’t move. She couldn’t be the one to move closer. So when Exon shuffled over and leaned her small frame against Riina’s shoulder, it was a shock she couldn’t have anticipated. Even this slight physical contact was electrifying. Riina’s face grew more and more red until Exon spoke.

  “Will… will you? Protect me?”

  It was a shaky voice whose owner was trying her best to inject strength into it. Riina’s heart pounded with anxiety as she clasped Exon’s hand in her own.

  “I promise I will.”

  Neither of them moved or spoke for a while. As anxiety about the awkward silence set in, Riina finally mustered the courage to speak again.

  “Hey… where exactly have you been sleeping? I have a bad feeling you’re spending the night on a bench in the park or something…”

  Exon hung her head.

  “… I haven’t been sleeping. I can operate for about 96 hours without experiencing any decrease in my mental or physical faculties, so I’ve just been moving around since we last met.”

  “Oh, right! I saw you earlier! You were running across the rooftops, right?” Riina exclaimed, glad to have solved this particular mystery. However, Exon looked puzzled.

  “Rooftops…? I don’t think I’ve been on any rooftops today. Actually, I was hiding out in one spot for the past few hours, wondering if I should confess to you about the Devil Brand…”

  “O-oh, I see… I must’ve been seeing things. Oh, but speaking of my Devil Brand…” Riina pulled out a thumbtack that was holding one corner of a poster to a bulletin board and jammed it into her finger. Exon’s eyes widened, and she cried out before covering her mouth. But Riina just pulled the thumbtack out and proudly presented the wounded finger.

  Like Riina had been hoping, there was no wound at all. The pinprick injury had healed before it even had the chance to draw blood.

  “A healing type…? Uwaaa… don’t scare me like that!” Exon playfully punched Riina’s shoulder to admonish her for her stunt. Riina simply smiled, glad to have brightened the other girl’s mood.

  “Anyway, I was thinking it’d be safer if we slept in the same bed. I’ll be on the side closer to the window, so anyone who wants to get to you will have to go through me first! T-that’s, umm… the reason…” Riina’s proud declaration of a strategy to make it through the night faltered as her reddening face betrayed her feelings.

  However, Exon gave a small smile.

  “That sounds like a good plan, Riina. But, to be completely safe, wouldn’t it be better if we were a bit closer together?”

  “… Critical hit…” Riina mumbled, before promptly fainting.